Joy had been pulled into hairbrained plans before, but this was the shittiest plan he had ever taken part in. Their plan was to appear directly in front of the guy with godlike powers and directly threaten him by putting his friend's life in jeopardy.

Joy didn't think he had a death wish, but maybe he was learning new things about himself every day. Life was a journey of self-discovery.

Dahlia and David were still discussing the terms of their arrangement, if one wanted to call them that. They were Dahlia's demands, and she just expected David to take it lying down.

"You will relinquish all the souls you have acquired. Furthermore, you will exhume the bones of Blood from your soul space. If you do this, we won't kill Rose."

"What guarantees do I have that you will let Rose and I go if I do this?"

"My word. You spared me when you had the chance to destroy me, and I will return the favor here."

"Well, that's not very encouraging."

An awkward silence filled the air as the two siblings stared at each other. Dahlia unflinching in her belief, and David so very tired of her foolishness. Joy watched as the siblings shared something deeper than words with their eyes.

"My dearest sister, why do you protect the gods? What have they ever done for us?"

"Because they made us and they are beyond us. Who are we to question their authority? Gods made us humans to be humans, not to be gods."

"Why did they make life hurt so much then. Disease, rape, murder, violence, misery – all of it. Why did the gods make it so that humans suffered for their entertainment? Why couldn't humans have been born to enjoy their lives rather than suffer through them?"

Joy couldn't help himself. Dahlia would never get through to David with the servants of the god shtick, so Joy used a different approach. "But the gods also made the sun shine on the open sea. They made it so that we could make art and enjoy a game of cricket. The world is as beautiful as it is painful David."

David turned on Joy, fire in his eyes. "And does that make it okay, Joy? Does your enjoyment of the sunrise make up for the thousands of people blinded by torture? Does your love of games make up for the humans forced to wage war and kill each other for the gods' sport?"

Joy didn't answer that. Like a coward, he hid behind Dahlia who was willing to confront David's insanity with her own.

Dahlia stuck her chest out in pride as she spoke. "The gods are good, David. I cannot allow you to break their perfect system. Maybe it took them thousands of years to iron it out, but we are living in a utopia created by them. We all have powers and can put good into the world. Would unkind gods do that?"

"Yes, you pretentious fool. The gods are kind to you." With those words the air shuddered a bit and power flowed around the confrontation. "Just because your life was so perfect in this world, does not make the world perfect. I will fix it and destroy the horrible creators."

Dahlia's eyes looked very sad while David's looked incensed. Rage and sadness filled the air between the two siblings.

"Release the souls and the god or I will kill Rose." Dahlia said with grim finality.

Before David could do or say anything in response Rose finally opened her mouth.

"Don't worry about me, David. Remember this isn't supposed to be about us or revenge or even about making our perfect utopia. It's about making life better for everyone."

Dahlia cruelly shut her up with a cuff to the mouth. Joy looked on in horror. He liked Rose and David. He hated what they had been doing, but they weren't evil. They shouldn't just attack them for the sake of it.

"What will it be David?" Dahlia motioned towards Joy, and he knew that he was supposed to gesture with the stone that was tied to Rose's life. It was all part of their act, but he couldn't bring himself to join in on this charade. He glumly stood there and looked into the eyes of David.

"Thank you Rose." David said as two mouths appeared out of the ground. He stepped onto the mouths, and they forcefully brought him into the sky towards the massive mouth that slobbered over the city. "This is the end, brace for it."

The giant mouth started to descend.

Rose was crying and Joy didn't know what to do. He felt that half of her was crying out of happiness. She was seeing her best friend overcome the selfishness that had motivated him and instead was truly trying to be benevolent now. On the other hand, this was her end. Death would come for her, because there was no way that Dahlia would go down without killing Rose.

Dahlia reacted to the giant mouth in the only way she knew how. She pointed at the two dragons and said, "kill it."

The twinned beasts, one dragon made by gifts thousands of years ago and the other was Julia in her dragon form, rose into the sky and breathed fire upon the titanic beast.

The mouth writhed under the heat but refused to be denied its chance to eat a city. Joy could feel the desire radiating off the thing. It wanted and wanted and wanted, and David had finally given it the go ahead to consume.

Joy looked over at Lillian as she sighed. She looked resigned and yet strong.

"I was really hoping that would work. But it looks like we are going to go down in a blaze of glory. How about that?" Lillian rolled one of her shoulders and started emitting an ethereal light.

"I think it's the only we could have gone out, Lillian. We were not born for pastures and farms; an adventurer can only hope to go out in a blaze like this one." Joy giggled as the insanity of the situation dawned on him.

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"That's where you're wrong, Joy. I always wanted to be a farmer with my brothers and sisters. Adventuring was just the only thing I ended up being good at."

"I hope you can have your happy ending on the farm, Lillian."

"Me too, me too."

The light coming out of Lillian exploded with a new intensity. Colors bled together around her and shadows came to life. The world was a canvas, and Lillian had just become an expressionist.

Reality ached as the light coalesced into a doorway. It was a simple door that had rusty hinges and a bolt keeping it closed. With what seemed to be incredible effort, Lillian reached towards the bolt and slid it open. Her fingers trembled and her body shook, but with a sweep of her arm, she opened the door.

Things poured out of the door.

Every creature was represented by some chimera hybrid. Chicken and mongoose had fused until it was a nightmarish creation. A dragon a hundred times the size of the two battling the mouth emerged next. A blob that oozed with anxiety. These and so much more erupted from the doorway of light.

"This is all of me. I am the god of myself, and I unleash myself upon the world in a bid to stop David." Lillian spoke quietly enough that Joy was certain that he was the only person who heard it.

The menagerie of monsters flew towards the mouth in the sky and ripped it to shreds. Titanic beasts of cruelty and pain gnashed their teeth upon David's hungering beast.

In ten seconds, the mouth that had easily withstood everything that two dragons had thrown against it was utterly destroyed.

David looked at Lillian and laughed. From the doorway of light, a pair of shoes that had wings floated out and attached themselves to Lillian's feet. She started flying up to meet David in the sky.

"I took you from that little farm that you were stuck on. I gave you purpose in a life where you were going to be nothing more than an extra farmhand. Now, you fight me like one of my sister's dogs. I am disappointed in you, Lillian."

"You gave me purpose but now I reject your ideals, David. You are wrong and you refuse to see anything other than power. So, here I am. The one true human god, here to stop you."

David screamed at Lillian. "You are NOT the human god. I am! You are just stealing bits from those things that look down on us. You aren't a god yet because you refuse to be more than human. But I do. I am more than any human could ever be anymore."

When gods battle, the world breaks. And this was only the prelude to the destruction that David would cause if he got his way and truly fought the gods, rather than just little old Lillian.

The sky was filled with abominations conjured up by Lillian's mind and they were fighting the mouths that were erupting from every surface of David's body. He was ripped to shreds by the collective monstrosities, only to reform moments later by stepping out of a new mouth.

Joy couldn't comprehend it, so he turned his face down and stopped looking at the battle in the sky.

Dahlia got onto her knees and pulled out a stick of chalk. With her chalk she started making fanciful diagrams on the ground. Once she finished with the diagrams, she pulled out powders and vials of fluids that she poured around the circle.

Out of the center of the circle a being of ineffable power appeared. The being was a top hat and a rabbit, a wand, a long white beard, and so much more. Power radiated off this god that Dahlia had called down to this plane of existence.

Joy knew that whatever had been sacrificed for summon a god must have been rare and horrible ingredients. This explained partly where Dahlia had been while Ramses had been fighting against David's forces alone.

Dahlia spoke to the god, "kill my brother for me. If you don't stop him now, you never will. So, kill him and be done with it."

The being that was the accumulated nature of magic laughed in Dahlia's face. The great white beard appeared in front of Dahlia and a mouth formed out of the blue essence that surrounded it.

"That's no way to speak to your god, Dahlia." The mouth turned into a leering grin that Joy would never have normally attributed to a god like Magic.

"I don't care about the proper ways to address you, Magic. If you don't kill him, you will be next. His ambitions won't stop with humanity. It will consume even you gods."

"Hehehehe. Foolish human, why do you presume to know the will of the gods? Do you think anything can happen on this plane of existence without us noticing? Do you think that David's power grew only through our ignorance? Do you think that we simply forgot about our sibling Blood? No, no, no, no, we are always watching and you're ruining the finale."

With that the god evaporated back to wherever gods lived.

"What? How? Why?" Dahlia started cycling through all the classic words to show how this was not something she had been prepared for. Joy held back his laughter since this was not a funny situation. But he wondered what Dahlia was thinking with this final stunt.

"Dahlia… did you think the gods would just solve our problems?" Joy took a step back, but he refused to be cowed from understanding this insane woman.

"But he's going to kill them. We are trying to stop him to save them. Why wouldn't they help?"

"I don't mean to be rude. Scratch that, I mean to be a little rude. But what did you expect? The gods have never been kind to humans. They expect us to face trials and tribulations for their sakes. Did they step in when the Shattered Continent fell to pieces? Did they swoop in to revive all the people that died on the Dead Continent just for Death to make a point? Did they even try to stop Water from freezing the Frozen Continent because the people there had gotten on the god's nerves? They are not known for benevolence, and they want to die, Dahlia. Can't you see that?"

"No, no, no. Why would gods want to die? They live endless lives of pleasure and exist beyond what our puny human minds can handle."

"Dahlia, they are bored. Wouldn't you get bored if you existed for all of time and couldn't change? They don't live and breathe like we do. They are just concepts given form. They are stuck playing out the same stories over and over and over again."

"But then who will save us?"

"No one, Dahlia. We lost. The world and the gods have aligned with David. We are standing in the way of the natural order."

With Joy's declaration, explosions tore across the sky as Lillian and David continued their epic battle. Lasers and cats and colors tore across the sky as they made war on the many mouths that David summoned up.

But Lillian would lose. She could match David in a content of power, at least for now. However, David had already completed his metamorphosis to reach beyond being a mere human. Lillian was still just a human that had access to godlike power. She was a conduit to a realm where she reigned supreme, but she herself was not supreme.

It might take hours, days if they were lucky. But Lillian would eventually get tired and slip up. David would do no such thing. He was unstoppable.

Dahlia finally responded, "I refuse to go out like this. Even if we must fall, we will make David hurt on our way out." Dahlia beckoned with one hand towards Joy. "Give me the stone."

The battle had been so intense that Joy had honestly forgotten about the rock sitting in the palm of his hand. It was so small and insignificant and yet it held the life of a woman.

Joy looked at the rock and then he looked at Rose. David would win, so shouldn't he try to spite him one last time? A quiet voice egged Joy on in his head. It screamed of unfairness and that one last act of vengeance would be David's just dessert for ruining this world.

This voice was winning, but Joy heard a different voice in his head. It was the voice of his parents from when he was a child. His parents were asking him, "would you rather hurt someone or help someone?" Joy had complained that they were oversimplifying how the world worked, there was no black and white distinction between one who saves and one who hurts. However, his parents rebuked him and said, "that's the lie that people who want you to hurt others tell you. It is that simple. It is not an easy task, but it is a simple one."

With twinning voices spiraling in Joy's mind, he turned to Dahlia and smiled. Taking a small step between Dahlia and Rose he said one simple but difficult word, "no."

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